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Originally published on 3-26-13 and moved here for easier mobile viewing.

I’ve seen several food shows that demonstrate how to make homemade chicken stock. While chicken stock has been a staple around the world for time out of mind, it’s still not the easy breeze a 30 minute TV show can make it seem. I’ve been doing this for years, and I’d like to fill in a few holes for first timers. This is going to be a lengthy recipe post with 19 pictures, and some think “overkill” while others weep with relief. THIS is how you make a really good old fashioned chicken stock.

Mine starts with a ceramic glazed cast iron stock pot that I ordered from Ginny’s ®. (NOT being paid to link that. I just really like this pot.) Best pot ever for super slow simmering. The heat distributes well, and you don’t get hot spots like you do with metal pots. If you prefer metal, try to use the thickest heaviest pot you can find so you can control the simmer not running away into a rolling boil on low heat over 2-3 hours.

If this is your first time, the first thing you do is schedule this adventure for a day where you’re not stressing against a time crunch. Do NOT plan the next meal around this, it’s too much work until you get used to it. People in the old days didn’t have technology and hectic lives, or this might never have been invented. I know, nothing like giving you a recipe that is arduous and time consuming, but it’s THE BEST chicken stock you ever tasted in your life. All your other recipes using chicken stock will benefit.

I like using Smart Chicken®. It’s a little more expensive, but looks and smells almost as fresh as a farm chicken I butchered myself and froze back. Whatever chicken you buy, make sure it fits into the pot comfortably. I’ve made mini versions of this with a cornish hen in a large saucepan, whatever takes your fancy. If you don’t have a whole chicken, use a bunch of chicken pieces with the bones still in, wings and legs are good for this. Part of the flavor comes from the skin, fat, and bones, not just the meat.

Rinse your chicken very thoroughly under lukewarm running water, inspecting it carefully for wax (looks yellow), pinfeathers, giblets and/or neck hidden in the inner cavity, etc. Be careful of broken rib and backbones if you reach inside. (If you do cut yourself on a bone, stop immediately and wash your hands with soap and water and cover the wound before you continue. Getting an infection in your skin from raw meat sucks, and getting your blood all over other people’s food is gross.) I like to pull out the stringy goop and cut off the tail and the big wad of excess skin on both sides of the open cavity. After rinsing, place the chicken directly into the pot. Throw away all the extra stuff not going into the pot, and wash your hands and the sink with soap. I wash my hands a second time just to be sure. I grew up on a farm, and we didn’t know back then about raw meats and cross contamination. I threw up a LOT. Be smart and save yourself a bad tummy ache later.

After that is all cleaned up, it’s time to prep veggies. Use a fresh knife, not the chicken knife. Make it a habit to use different utensils for meats and veggies, even if you know it will all be cooked together. Why? Because, in this instance, you only want half of a large onion and 2-3 stalks of celery. Don’t contaminate what you don’t use right away with a meat knife. You’ll also want a couple of large carrots, peeled and cut in half. I like stuffing carrot and celery inside the chicken. Wash your hands immediately after touching the chicken again. Put the rest of the veggies into the pot.

On TV shows they tie these up into sprigs and/or a little bag. Making chicken stock is a lot like making tea. Steeping the loose leaf herbs slowly with plenty of room for them to circulate and swell brings such a beautiful aroma and flavor that tying it all into a little bag seems like a crime. Doing that doesn’t really save you any time or work later, because you still have to strain the stock when you’re done anyway, right? May as well go for gold.

When all your ingredients are assembled into the pot, pour water over it all up to 1-2 inches from the top. You want to leave some room in case you walk off and it boils, which I’ve done on more impatient days. You’ll also need splash room, which I’ll get to in a minute.

Put the lid on and turn the burner on low. Trust me. If your chicken was already thawed, 3 hours will be about right on low. If it was frozen solid, give it 4-5 hours, but still keep it on low. If you are using chicken pieces instead of a whole chicken, or cooking a cornish hen in a smaller pot, maybe two hours is good. You’ll get the hang of it.

About halfway through the cooking time, one to one and a half hours for the big chicken, you’ll want to turn it over. It will cook through just fine without turning it over if you leave the lid on, but turning it gives all the meat steeping time in the stock for flavor and juiciness. Some of my biggest messes have happened while I’m turning a hot chicken over in a scalding stock bath, so be careful about burns. If you do get scalded, immediately get ice or at least cold running water onto the burn before it blisters. Your skin will literally cook from that high temp, and you must cool it quickly so it will stop the cooking. Heat denatures protein, breaks the molecular bonds, and the ice or cold water will stop that process. Never ignore a burn, even if it doesn’t hurt that bad. It will hurt bad later when your nerves recover from being cooked alive.

Here’s a good way to turn a chicken. Use a long handled heavy gauge slotted spoon and a very long fork, one in each hand. Guide the fork into the inner cavity while you brace the chicken with the spoon. When you have the fork inserted well enough to move the chicken, lift slightly (lifting higher creates a bigger splash if the chicken slips), and turn like a spit while you use the spoon to help maneuver it on over. Resist the urge to stand real close to the pot for better leverage or bracing or whatever, that is a mistake and you could wind up having to change your clothes and ice your chest and stomach. (Twenty years of experience…) Once the chicken is turned enough to go on over, use the spoon to ease it on down. Put the lid back on and walk away again.

Your chicken will be cooked through soon after, but it’s not ‘done’ until it easily comes apart when you press the spoon down into the mid back. When you’ve reached this stage, turn off the burner and let your stock rest with the lid on. You can take the chicken and veggies out now if you want, or you can let them cool a little in the stock. It will all stay hot for a good hour because the heavy pot is so efficient at holding the heat in.

After an hour, you need to go ahead and get the chicken out onto a plate. It’ll still be pretty warm, but you can cover it in plastic wrap at this point to hold in the moisture and cool on the counter for half an hour. Never put hot food into the refrigerator. Hot food can shatter glass shelves in the fridge, and can encourage mold growth in foods it touches or sits near, because they’ll become less cool being next to something hot and can take too long to cool back down again. Since your chicken just came from a long simmer, it is sterile coming out of the pot and won’t spoil while it’s cooling down on the counter, but don’t leave it out longer than a couple of hours. When it is cool enough to comfortably handle, I put the chicken into a gallon storage bag into the fridge to deal with later.

Strain the veggies out of the stock into a bowl using a slotted spoon, and keep spooning through until you’re pretty sure you’ve gotten the bay leaf and all the stray layers of onion that have floated off. Throw all that away. It might be tempting to think you can use it later somehow, but trust me, it’s not worth it. The flavor and nutrition have steeped out of the veggies into the stock, they’ve done their duty. Throw them away.

Straining stock isn’t hard. Some recipes say to strain through cheesecloth, which is expensive and way messier than this needs to be. Unless you are hoping to make a clear consume or broth, you just don’t need that extra stress. I use a large mesh strainer with a handle so it will sit over a bowl. I set the bowl in the sink so I don’t have to clean up what I spill, and from there it’s a matter of tipping the stock pot just right so all the liquid goes through the strainer. Then I carry the strainer to the trash, clap the crap out, and immediately wash it with soap so I don’t have to mess with it later. The faster you get that strainer cleaned up, the less you’ll hate straining stock. If you leave that strainer sitting around until the chicken fat hardens and the herbs dry, it will be impossible to clean and you’ll never make chicken stock from scratch again.

I really like using tupperware for that stock, put a lid right on it and set it into the fridge. You can leave it alone there up to 3 days, but after that you either need to cook with it or freeze it back. Stock spoils faster than just about any food on the planet. If you open it and it has spoiled, you can’t salvage it. Throw it out because it will only poison you now, no matter what you do. You can kill germs with heat, but mold is a molecular structure that can survive heat and wreak havoc in your body. (Grain molds can cause brain damage if bread is made from moldy grain. Don’t cook mold!!!!)

All the fat in the stock floats to the top, and in the fridge it hardens into a skim on top, which is very easy to remove while it’s still cold. Use a spoon to skim it off and throw it away. What’s left is technically an aspic and wiggles like Jello. It melts right back into stock as soon as you heat it up, and it’s now ready to go into your recipes. You can measure it out by the cup and freeze in ziplock bags. I froze this batch into a quart bag to use in stuffing next Thanksgiving.

The rest of the herbs that got through the strainer all settle at the bottom of the aspic, and will stay there as long as you don’t tip the bowl or disturb it as you ladle the stock into bags. When I get down to that stuff, I just pour the dregs down the sink and flush a little water after it. With the fat and other solids removed, this small amount won’t cause a clog.

Like this:

Since Mike’s friends and fans are used to podcasts, I’m going to write this out for my readers as if we were talking like you do on a podcast. Years ago I learned the power of print in fandoms when I started transcribing podcast interviews for hearing impaired fans. Although I was asked to remove them, they’d already been translated and warehoused all over the world and are still searchable years later. Links will be red, Mike talking back to me will be blue.

I first met Michael Bilinski through the Snarkalec Radio podcasts , which were pretty awesome, Mike, with you drinking shots out of a doll head you called Judith from the Walking Dead series. That hooked me as a Mike Bilinski fan before I ever knew all the other stuff you do. I particularly love your new Opium Den series and clearly you have a prolific cult pull, but if it’s ok with you, I’d like to stick to print since it’s my own medium. Apologies for making you talk through a keyboard to me. 😊

(Q-1) My top question regarding your new album release Dead Girls is about the song title “Killing Culture” (click to listen free!), Carl Kavorkian is overlayed near the beginning with audio from a television show? Did you guys create that affect or lift an audio snip? (source?). And then Carl uses that intro to go directly into story mode. (elaborate?)

The song Killing Culture came from a confluence of events that took place in the months leading into the formal writing/recording process for the album. My friendShane Ryanis the creator and star of theAmateur Porn Star Killer series. I was an executive producer of the third film and wrote and directed a sequence of theFaces of Snuffanthology project that is a direct byproduct of those films. Shane ran into a great deal of trouble while casting for a new project but while that was going on there were a number of books and articles heavily referring to theAPSK franchisewhen discussing the relationship between this type of adversarial art and our culture.

All the while there seemed to me a surge in interest in these projects. I’m used to people bringing upEvil Bong, its easily the most commercially successful project I have been involved with, but around the time I started writing this song someone approached me in a bar and told me APSK 3 changed their life. I still don’t know how to take that exactly. Their demeanor implied they meant this in a positive way which poses a number of questions. Days later another person told me they prayed I never had children. Especially a daughter.

All of this had me thinking about how we as an audience consume and interpret violent imagery. I feel strongly that the job of any artist isn’t to gloss over challenging subject matter, or ignore it completely, but to make their audience feel some kind of weight behind such serious actions. So the song and my contribution to Faces were created in tandem to reflect that. When Carl got involved with the track he put his own stamp on it by pointing out that videos of violence involving police that we see on mainstream news outlets are actual “snuff” films. Someone is being injured or killed and people are profiting from the recordings of it.

(Q-2) You mentioned in an interview with BraveWords that this album Dead Girls is themed, that there is a common thread running throughout the process. Would you call this an art performance think piece? I know part of the process of experiencing the music is not over explaining, but you definitely have a motive and a goal going on, and I’m also wondering if this ties in overall with previous albums or is a stand alone work?

My previous music project was an ambient soundscape with a post apocalyptic theme. I wanted to follow that with something more personal. AsChristian Mensesand I began talking out possible themes we decided that we needed to be more open and introspective than we have ever been in our past work. Strip away any buffer and make the album as raw as possible. This carried over to the music ad well. The album has more of a live quality. We limited the number of takes for each piece and often used our first or second pass on the final track. I recorded my synth parts using analog equipment and playing through a guitar amp with a mic set up in the room. This led to a number of unplanned moments that made it to the final product. The most blatant of these is the ending ofScarlet Seduction.

I knew there would be songs about specific women in my life and as we started mapping it out I realized that my interactions with these women created a framework of my life from our last proper studio album,A Season In Hell, until now.

Christian, Jennifer and I seem to have these bizarre parallels in our personal lives so the stories they brought to the project fit perfectly. I don’t know if that is a good thing but it certainly drove us creatively.

(Q-3) Wildly switching gears, I noticed on your facebook share that you did some work for State Farm? Does this make you a corporate provider now? (lolz) In years past, some of my fave music for movies has been done by Van Halen and Dire Straits. Do you see yourself going down that road one day? (which I personally think would be cool!)

Yeah Pagan and State Farm sounds like a wild cosplay mash up but honestly my writing is inspired more by film and television scores than any particular band or genre. I think about the atmosphere of a song first and usually start with a synth pad as my foundation instead of a guitar riff or a beat. Because of that I think many of our tracks lend themselves to being paired with visuals. I am particularly interested in creating original material for projects which was the case for State Farm. My good friend and podcast partnerKelly Thulset that up and I am extremely grateful. Working with State Farm will help people get around any preconceived notions they may have about what type of material our music can work with.

Most people don’t know this but I was a freelance writer for a few years. I don’t hide it or anything like that, it just rarely comes up. I worked primarily for AOL and Yahoo through their various subsidiaries. During that time I also wrote a few short stories that were published by various magazines, sites and an anthology book. I never actively perused fiction writing so each story was tailored for that specific project. Ultimately the market became over saturated and the standard rates dropped rapidly. I went from earning a living to losing money on jobs and had to move on. Pagan has proven to be the most healthy outlet for me to express myself so I’m probably better off in the long run.

(Q-5) Part of my stalking obsession leads me to little gems that I sift out of mountains of material in search engines. When I first started looking for more info on you and Pagan, I got so much junk in the way that I feel like you need to make a page pulling all your press releases, announcements, and interviews into a menu. (Don’t ask me to do that though, I’m busy, lol.) I’ll share a few samples here and please let me know if there’s more you’d like readers to check out.

PAGAN – New Album Title, Cover Art Revealed; Box Set In The Works 4-6-13 “I wouldn’t say this is a true concept album,” Bilinski explains, “but their is a loose apocalyptic theme that runs throughout. That is what led to the idea of the “Survival Kit”, which is going to bring an almost interactive element to the album by providing the listener with all the tools they need to immerse themselves in a world we have created a soundtrack for.”

Basically, readers have a hard time finding “Pagan” in a search engine since human history and culture is so saturated with pagan everything imaginable, so I put “Michael Bilinski Pagan” into the search bar and find your stuff a lot faster.

The name has been a double edge sword. Pagan started as my solo project but I didn’t want to use my name as I was largely associated with my work in black and death metal and this was something different that I wanted people to approach with a clean slate. It’s easy to remember and the associations it creates in the minds of most people fit well with many of our themes. As it became my focus and evolved into a band with Jennifer, Christian, the live band and the new addition rhythm guitarist Corey Torres, there are times I wish we were an easier Google search. That being said I also find our search results to be a solid gauge of our expanding visibility.

~~~~~~

Disclaimer- this post is a fan write up by a fan for fans. No compensation in any form is given for linking and sharing this information. Permission is given to translate and share this post in whole or part to other sites, kindly please link back to this source.

I’d like to profusely thank Mike for taking the time to respond to my questions, and I wish him all the best with Pagan’s success. Again, you can listen to Killing Culture for free, click to go to the pre-release freebie and keep an eye out for the album release of Dead Girls on April 28.

“Killing Culture“, featuring Carl Kavorkian, is currently climbing culty single release sales worldwide, as evidenced by sites making it available in Russia and other countries, and of course in the U.S. on Amazon. Killing Culture is a featured single on the album Dead Girls by Pagan.

You can follow Mike on Facebook for up to date announcements, like this one– #vga Killing Culture art for all our old school #gamer friends. On #420 we are going to need your help making the video number 1 on #amazon We already hit top 10 on the #rock and #hiphop charts and we want to take over to celebrate the upcoming release of #deadgirls part 1! #pagan #goth #industrial #rap #horror #horrorcore #metal #studio #studiolife #skull #sugarskull”

What is the big deal, we wonder… So many are already jumping on this, so little is actually searchable about it besides the excellent (but quite short) BraveWords interview. What else is there to know about this whole Dead Girls thing? I could so easily launch into how beautifully the sugar skull symbolism portrays the content, and what the “connecting thread” for all these women must be. I am so intrigued with the commitment Michael Bilinski has made to using this theme in world sales coinciding with his contributions to a very hotly debated and reviewed Faces of Snuff released last November, described by Amazon and other outlets as “The world’s first snuff anthology, with disturbing films collected from around the world from over 20 filmmakers, who all push the boundaries of how far cinema can be pushed.” I could grab it and run with how it relates to some of my own life experiences. But honestly, I’d rather keep digging and find out what’s going on in Mike Bilinski’s head.

If you feel the need to further stalk Mike Bilinski and what he’s doing, click this pic for my post full of links.

The really fun part of stalking someone is when they actually give you stuff to stalk. Mike isn’t the wordiest guy in print about how prolific he’s becoming producing music and controversial film, and I’ve already mentioned in past that digging up more is hampered by so much of human history and world culture being umbrellaed and even buried under words like Pagan and Killing Culture. But that’s the point, isn’t it? The dark world that lies underneath mountains of real life and distraction and entertainment. The truth being debated as art and intention versus the weight of portrayal of truth. The beauty in human minds, souls, and spirits overlaying the shadows in our hearts. When I try to put anything Mike is doing into words, I wind up in a land of poetry and get lost wondering what Poe would make of Pagan.

I love Pagan’s music in general. I was intro’d to a dark ambient goth-rock visual in Aftermath during a driving need for distraction, nearly to the point of transcendence in order to deal with pain, which I first mention in Be My Pagan Valentine. On a very personal level, I tend to drift away from mainstream while I deal, and I’m noticing I seem to fit in with other people who do the same thing. The ‘common thread’ Michael brings up in the BraveWords interview might be a sort of common thread for many of us.

This newest release, Dead Girls, strikes an extremely personal chord with me. Humans internalize, own, and recreate, that’s what we do. Pagan’s sugar skull art covering the somewhat explicit and very human sounds and commentary coming through with the music is a vehicle that carries us into darker recesses that we sometimes don’t allow ourselves to pontificate. We might see it around us as entertainment, we might even live it and block it out, but the music opens the mind and allows us to stand on that bridge connecting intellectual assessment and instinctual fear and horror. Well, some of us. I know there is a chasm between assessing and actually living this level of art.

Quote from the BraveWords interview about tour dates- “Dead Girls will be supported by Pagan’s largest scale tour to date with Michael and Vex taking part in the third annual Snarkstock event June 11th and 12th in Baltimore, MD, Christian joining Psychotica for a US run beginning late July followed by Pagan dates in the Fall and Winter that will see the band play across the US with dates in Canada and Europe.”

I really do love this guy. I don’t think I’ve ever stalked anyone so hard, but it’s fun because there’s so little really out there. This pic clicks to source on Mike’s Facebook. You know, so you can stalk him, too.